Bushies fear Obama weakening presidency

President Barack Obama just turned decades of debate over presidential war powers on its head.

Until Saturday, when Obama went to Congress to ask for permission to strike Syria, the power to launch military action had been strongly in the hands of the commander in chief. Even the 1973 War Powers Resolution allows bombs to start falling before the president has to ask Congress for long-term approval.

Text Size

-

+

reset

For three decades after Watergate, conservatives like Dick Cheney and those of his ilk sought to increase executive branch power that they felt had been eroded by liberal congressional reformers. George W. Bush’s legal team crafted controversial opinions that emboldened the White House on a wide range of national security areas, from interrogation to surveillance.

That makes the move by Obama to hand a piece of the messy situation in Syria to Congress a clear step in the other direction — an abdication of power to Congress at a moment when he has no good solutions.

And even if Obama ultimately balks at Congress if they vote down his ask, prominent conservatives who fueled the expansion of presidential power — especially Bush administration alums — are beside themselves, arguing that Obama has weakened the presidency.

John Yoo, who wrote the legal opinions that justified the Bush administration’s interrogation tactics with sweeping views of executive power, says Obama has undermined the quick-strike ability that gives presidents much of their power in dealing with military threats.

“Legislatures are slow — Congress will not vote on the authorization until the second week of September. They are fractious … They do not act with unity, secrecy, and speed,” Yoo, now a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley, wrote in a blog post for National Review. And if Congress says no, Yoo wrote, Obama will be “acting from the weakest political position and will have sacrificed the advantages of speed and decisiveness that are the executive’s core advantages.”

John Bolton, who served as ambassador to the United Nations under Bush, agreed.

“The reason that you vest executive power in one person instead of 535 is to get something done,” Bolton told POLITICO. If Obama had wanted congressional approval, Bolton added, “he should have thought of that last August when he drew the red line the first time, and he should have been working since last August to get that political support” so he could have taken action in March after the first reports that Syrian President Bashar Assad had used chemical weapons on a smaller scale.

“No decision is ever totally catastrophic, but this one comes close,” said Bolton. “To say that you have made a decision to use force, that the matter is grave and the timing is urgent and then to say but I’m not going to do it is irresponsible.”

Obama insists that technically he could still go ahead with the bombing if he gets a no vote— a point Secretary of State John Kerry, himself a veteran of many Senate debates over war resolutions, made on the Sunday talk shows.

“He has the right to do that no matter what Congress does,” Kerry said on CNN’s State of the Union. “But the president believes, and I hope that we will prove to the world, that we are stronger as a nation, our democracy is stronger when we respect the rights of the Congress to also weigh in on this.”

But it will be a much harder case to make to the public if Congress gives him a thumbs down. If that happens, whatever Obama does will set a precedent — he’ll either prove that the commander in chief can still order limited military strikes, or future presidents will have their hands tied.

“There is no precedent that I’m aware of for failing to get approval and proceeding anyway,” said Peter Shane, a law professor at Ohio State University who studies presidential power.

If Congress just doesn’t approve a resolution, Shane said, Obama has a bit more flexibility than if Congress specifically forbids him from going ahead. Clinton kept the air strikes going in Kosovo after Congress failed to authorize it — and Obama could just say he would have preferred to have congressional approval, but couldn’t get it.

Politically, though, that’s “extremely difficult,” Shane said. And it’s the opposite of the message Obama is sending now — that the country is stronger if Congress gives the go-ahead.

Ever since the passage of the War Powers Resolution, at a time when the nation was still reeling from the Vietnam War, presidents from both parties have refused to acknowledge that they’re bound by it. When they give reports to Congress on military actions, their statements always say the report is “consistent with” the War Powers Resolution — rather than in compliance with it.

But the resolution is specifically designed to make presidents go to Congress for approval of long-term wars — any military action longer than 60 days, or 90 days under special circumstances. It doesn’t say the president has to report to Congress before a military strike. It just says the president has to report to Congress within 48 hours after the strikes begin.

So far, Obama is getting the best reaction from liberal Democrats, who still have a bad taste in their mouths from Bush’s pitch for the Iraq War — built on scary threats about weapons of mass destruction that turned out not to be there — and think Obama is showing more respect for Congress.

“Given the positions taken by past presidents, the President’s decision to seek congressional approval is especially commendable,” Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), a strong advocate of congressional oversight of the executive branch, said in a statement.

“Seems to me President Obama is acting the way constitutional law professor Obama and Senator Obama said a president ought to act,” said Democratic strategist and former Clinton adviser Paul Begala. “He is the antithesis of George W. Bush: no lies about ‘imminent threats,’ no bullying, no impugning the patriotism of his critics. I am proud of my president.”